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4.
A tree that looks it! — Gawd! Auld, eh?
And Liffs hurl eavey alms, tout prêts.
And so it goes. The world-weariness, the melancholy, Skilmer in the depths
of his Hamlet mood, or what he himself ruefully called, in the bad German
he had learned from "certain ladies" in Milwaukee, "meines Hamletische
Gesauerpusskeit". Does even Hamlet, whom so many have called the
"Danish Skilmer", have a line so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable as "A
tree that looks it"? — in which the poet accepts the
humble
monotony of things as they are in their weary haecceitas, the
sad fact that they are only what they are, and so fully look
what
they are, instead of embodying the splendor of their Platonic archetypes.
"The interminable pyramical napkin," broods E. E. Cummings —
but
how sesquipedalian this in comparison with Skilmer's demotic oomph. And
from time immemorial this nauseating sameness — old indeed, and
more
than old. Probably there is no more plangent understatement in the language
than Skilmer's simple but despairing "auld". For the poet,
unable to tear his ravaged heart from thoughts of Thrane, glumly
Scotticizes: "Auld, eh?" he spits out, thereby more keenly
And Liffs hurl eavey alms, tout prêts.
7
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